Albanese's Palestinian recognition shows the world is now waiting on Trump

Sydney Morning Herald

21 hours ago

The United States' ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, wasn't about to repeat his private conversations with Donald Trump live on television. But he was happy to characterise what the US president and his administration thought about Australia's decision to recognise a Palestinian state this week.
'There's an enormous level of disappointment, and some disgust... This is a gift to them [Hamas], and it's unfortunate,' Huckabee told the ABC's 7.30 on Thursday night. 'The emotional sentiment [was] a sense of: You've got to be kidding. Why would they be doing this? And why would they be doing this now?'
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who had been dealing with a challenging domestic response to his government's decision since Monday, had answers on Friday morning, starting with a similar feeling.
'Australians have been disgusted by what they see on their TV every night. They were disgusted by the terrorist actions of Hamas on October 7, the slaughter of innocent Israelis,' he said on ABC radio. 'But Australians have also seen the death of tens of thousands of people. When you have children starving, when you have children losing their lives, with families queuing for food and water, then that provokes, not surprisingly, a human reaction.'
Albanese's decision to follow France, the United Kingdom and Canada in declaring that Australia would recognise Palestine at the United Nations next month was, in part, a human reaction to suffering as striking images of hunger came out of Gaza.
Pressure was bubbling inside the Labor caucus and, just the weekend before, more than 100,000 Australians marched in protest over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and on the streets of Melbourne. The prime minister's foreign policy shift was also pragmatic: once like-minded countries made the move, there was expectation that Albanese would add to global momentum.
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But if Albanese expected warm feedback, it was not forthcoming. Before Huckabee took aim at Australia's decision, Israel had expressed its fury, Jewish Australian groups said they had been betrayed, and even prominent pro-Palestine advocates were lukewarm. The praise, when it burst onto newspaper front pages, was not from desired sources. Instead, senior officials from Hamas, the listed terrorist organisation that conducted the October 7 attacks, praised the prime minister's move, exposing Albanese to fierce criticism and accusations of naivety.
Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst who worked on US negotiations to end the conflict for decades, doubts next month's meeting at the United Nations will lead to the outcome Western leaders are hoping for. He says a two-state solution remains the 'least-worst option' but the time is not right, given Hamas remains in power in Gaza and the far-right Netanyahu government leads Israel.
'The Australians have had no experience in this region. The British and the French have, and they should know that the Middle East is literally littered with the remains of great powers, their schemes, their dreams, their ambitions, their peace plans,' Miller says.
'I don't see any relationship between what's being done and the impact that it will have on the current situation, let alone on bringing anybody closer to a meaningful two-state solution... Why is it the right time? There's no logical, compelling explanation. This is being done for domestic political reasons or out of moral and ethical motivations.'
But the Western nations, including Australia, say a deteriorating situation has added urgency to the two-state push. 'There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise,' Wong said last week. On Friday, Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich raised the stakes: he announced that work will start on a long-delayed settlement to divide the West Bank and cut it off from East Jerusalem, a move his office said would 'bury' the idea of a Palestinian state.
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'Whoever in the world is trying to recognise a Palestinian state today will receive our answer on the ground. Not with documents nor with decisions or statements, but with facts. Facts of houses, facts of neighbourhoods,' he said. Smotrich, a settler himself, claimed Netanyahu and Trump had agreed to the development, although there was no immediate confirmation from either.
The Albanese government started laying the groundwork for this week's announcement long before that threat. Foreign Minister Penny Wong started making the case for recognising Palestine as part of a two-state process – rather than at the end of one – back in April last year. Wong said recognition had always been a matter of 'when, not if'. As accusations of mass starvation were levelled at Israel in recent weeks, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signalled a takeover of Gaza City, other nations made historic moves towards recognition. Then it became Australia's turn. 'We didn't want to be leading the pack, but we didn't want to be too slow either,' a government source told this masthead this week. Albanese said he was also reassured by recent commitments from the Palestinian Authority and Arab League.
Still,backlash was swift. Israel's ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, said Albanese had abandoned his own conditions for recognition and would reward Hamas in the process. Netanyahu called it shameful. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry – who had been assured by the prime minister a fortnight earlier that recognition was not imminent – described it as a betrayal.
Peter Moss, the co-convenor of Labor Friends of Palestine, said the move would be applauded by the party's rank-and-file as a 'historic milestone'. But a co-founder of the Labor Friends of Israel group, Nick Dyrenfurth, said some lifetime Jewish Labor members were considering quitting the party with a sense of despair.
Even Nasser Mashni, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, called the decision a 'cynical political smokescreen'. Many Palestinians and pro-Palestine advocates labelled recognition a distraction and instead urged the government to pursue sanctions, an arms embargo, and an end to trade with Israel.
As the week continued, interjections from Hamas, a listed terrorist organisation, compounded the controversy. This masthead reported that the office of a Hamas co-founder, Hassan Yousef, applauded Australia's decision. Albanese warned media outlets not to report propaganda, and a statement issued in a Hamas telegram channel disavowed the comments attributed to Yousef, saying he was detained and cut off from the outside world. But two other senior Hamas officials soon made similar comments, calling Australia's move towards recognition a 'positive step towards the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people'.
John Coyne, the national security director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says the complicated structure of Hamas and its leadership – now dispersed across the world, with diminished numbers in Palestine itself – made it difficult to interpret messages from the group. 'When you've got a global terrorist organisation, it's not like an elected government or public service bureaucracy. The term leadership is used very loosely,' he says. 'There are a number of senior figures and so of course, they'll all have their perspectives and at a time of chaos and change, people aspire to challenge the status quo and become the spokesperson.'
But having warned Albanese over recent weeks that he was playing into Hamas' hands, the federal opposition jumped. 'Hamas is more than supporting the decision [Albanese] made, they are in full throated praise of it, they are cheering on, they are calling our Prime Minister a man of courage,' said opposition leader Sussan Ley. 'On a day when a terrorist organisation calls our Prime Minister a hero, surely he has to think about reversing the decision that led to that.'
If Labor had envisioned a political win at the beginning of the week, Albanese did not show it. 'This decision is criticised by people on all sides of the debate. I expected that to be the case,' he said on the Today show on Tuesday. 'The people who are saying this is not the way forward... Ok, what's your plan? The plan of Prime Minister Netanyahu is just to continue: continue to push into Gaza, occupy Gaza City. How will that provide a resolution going forward to ongoing conflict that has been there for 77 years?'
Most countries in the United Nations – 147 of 193 – already recognise Palestine. But commitments from Australia, France, the UK and Canada to recognise Palestine at a UN General Assembly meeting in New York next month add heft. Several European nations, including G20 members Italy and Germany, have not yet pledged to do so, nor have Japan and South Korea. New Zealand could be the next to add its voice, after conservative prime minister Chris Luxon this week said Netanyahu had 'lost the plot'.
But analysts emphasise it is the United States that will ultimately determine whether a Palestinian state inches closer to reality or remains fantasy. 'At the end of the day, the international community can jump up and down as much as they want, but until the US agrees to accept the Palestinian admission into the UN general assembly … this concept of statehood is going to remain an idea,' says Shahram Akbarzadeh, a professor in Middle East politics at Deakin University.
'I don't see how a Trump administration could vote yes to Palestinian statehood ... I think we will see the continuation of Palestinian lives in limbo in terms of international law and international standing.'
Amin Saikal, another expert, shares his scepticism. But he thinks Trump could be the wildcard that changes the trajectory of the Middle East. 'There are some elements within the MAGA movement that have called for a revision of American support for Israel,' he says, pointing to congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, and commentators Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. 'Trump does look at his base, and he does really take what comes out of MAGA quite seriously. At the same time, he is an unpredictable transactional leader.'
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Trump threatened Canada's trade deal in response to its recognition of Palestine, only to walk the threat back. Before Huckabee gave his full-throttled criticism of Australia, the White House declined to weigh in, saying Trump was 'not married to any one solution'. The US president is a staunch ally of Netanyahu, but even he has lashed out at the Israeli prime minister, most recently by disputing Israel's claims of there being no starvation in Gaza.
'It may come to the point that you could see the widening of the rift between the United States and its allies is not really going to benefit the United States,' Saikal says. 'Therefore [Trump] may decide to soften his position, or put more pressure on the Israeli leadership to accept the reality of a two-state solution as inevitable and as the only one.'